In many of the Case Management scenarios we see at our clients, particularly in the insurance industry, requirements often include functionality that allow the user to easily combine, split or correct PDF documents from within the web browser. Most often, users want the ability to combine multiple documents or selected pages into one document in order to easily send documentation out to 3rd parties via email or other means. When documents are ingested into the system via a scanning tool or 3rd party document feed, we also see users requiring the ability rotate and reorder pages, as well as splitting pages out into a separate document. For this post, we will look at these scenarios in more detail.

Why the need for PDF Manipulation?

Some systems include a robust scanning interface utilizing a tool such as Ephesoft that allows for scanned documents to be split and manipulated prior to the content arriving in the ECM repository. However, other clients have automated scanning processes and/or ingest documents from 3rd parties. In these cases, and the ingested documents can often require manipulation after being received. For example, some of our insurance clients receive a single document from a 3rd party source that is in actuality multiple documents. Additionally, some of the included documents (ex: loss reports, police reports, etc.) may have already been received from other sources. In these cases, it can be useful to have document manipulation features built into the ECM repository interface.

OpenContent Case and OpenAnnotate provide a number of features relating to manipulating a document PDF:

Split a Single Document into Multiple

As discussed in the scenario above, users will need the ability to split a PDF into multiple documents. OpenAnnotate provides a simple interface to extract pages from a document:

Additionally, OpenContent Case provides a full featured document split action, which saves split out documents back to the case folder:

Combine Multiple Documents into One

OpenContent Case provides an easy to use interface to combine two or more documents into one in order to generate a document “package” that can then sent to 3rd party systems.

Rotate and Reorder Pages

Within OpenAnnotate, users can easily correct mistakes that happen during the scanning process. For example, the user can rotate pages as well as reorder pages in the document.

Check out the screencam below to see a demo of the above features:

Let us know your thoughts below.